Overheard a guy at a trade show say 'shutters are just curtains'...

I was at a small repair meetup in Portland last month, and this younger guy was talking about how he never bothers with shutter timing adjustments. He said something like, 'shutters are just curtains, close enough is good enough.' It really got under my skin. I've spent too many late nights with an oscilloscope dialing in those curtain speeds on a beat-up Nikon F2. If you're off by even 5 milliseconds at 1/1000th, you'll see it in the negative's exposure banding. I wonder how many cameras he's let out the door with issues nobody caught until the customer shot a whole roll. Has anyone else run into this attitude where people skip the precision stuff?

2 comments

2 Comments

blake3021mo ago

Didn't someone post a shutter speed test strip that proved that point exactly?

hunt.leo1mo ago

Read a thread on Photrio last week where someone ran a test strip on a Calumet monorail and the shutter was off by almost a full stop at 1/500. @blake302 the consensus was that older mechanical shutters drift way more than people realize. Got me checking my own lenses more often now.